Tag Archives: Writing

Beginning screenwriters often want to begin writing screenplays but don’t know where to start. They want to create professional looking scripts but don’t want to shell out large amounts of cash for Final Draft (the industry’s standard scriptwriting software) — nor should they. There are a few free screenwriting programs available for the budding screenwriter, but the major two are Celtx and Adobe Story Free.

Two Free Screenwriting Software

1.) Celtx has risen to be the most popular free scriptwriting software out there. It has evolved from its simple beginnings as a stand alone desktop software for writing plays and screenplays to its current flashy form, which includes cloud storage and online collaborative tools. It has templates for stageplays, screenplays, audio plays, and comic books. For extra features, users will need to purchase the full version — but the free version works fine for most people.Continue reading →

My ability to write in the nonfiction genre–whether it’s a creative flash piece, a commentary, or a fieldwork project–has improved greatly in the past few months. Studying how both famous authors (such as George Orwell and Tom Wolfe) and lesser known authors (such as Lillian Ross and Michael Winerip), use literary techniques to heighten their observations and research has allowed me to experiment and develop my own creative voice.

Using these literary techniques and writing nonfiction outside of an academic tone and purpose–especially during my senior year–has been both refreshing and useful. I’ve enjoyed writing for purposes that weren’t tied to proving a clever–but ultimately useless and distorted–thesis or being tethered to the tangential ideas or biases of a GSI in order to obtain a good grade. Instead, focusing on writing in a meaningful and effective manner–along with the readings, exercises, and assignments demonstrating this–has allowed me to further practice writing that has greater longevity and usefulness (for both creative and non-creative purposes): communicating in an accessible manner, eschewing jargon and obscurity, and using literary techniques to emphasize the truth of experiences or details.

Fieldworking and investigative writing was a new experience for me. Although I had never written anything like this, I thought my previous experience in writing news articles for a student newspaper (mainly covering school or community events) would help with this form of writing. Specifically, I thought my previous experience in interviewing strangers for articles might make it slightly easier for me to walk up and question random people — but this wasn’t the case.

The end of a career panel where attendees get to talk with the guest speakers, as well as each other.

It wasn’t just the common experience of finding people unwilling to talk on record (a regular bump in these forums that will hold public quotes and sources accountable for any statement). But what I hadn’t realized was that I was simply rusty. It had been more than two years since I had officially interviewed someone to be used as a source and most of my recent writing has been limited to academic essays, with audiences enclosed to the limited circle of professors, graduate student instructors (GSIs), and classmates. In addition the time-heavy requirements of my classes and assignments had made me overly used to solitude. So, when I wanted or tried to talk to new people for the purpose of having them as a source, I would become hesitant and fearful of the interaction — a reaction I thought I had conquered years ago. But it came back. As I approached potential sources, I stuttered and and my mind blanked. It was as if I had lost the interviewing skills I previously had.

The white-gloved girl waves her Christmas-lighted hands in quick circles and lines and unnameable polygons in front of my soon-to-be deejaying friend’s face. Her jubilee hands move in and out all around his face, coming within millimeters of his eyes and skin.

The end of the first chapter of Fieldworking, a research and writing guide by Bonnie Sunstein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater, provides a few steps to think, choose, and write about a potential field topic or site. In particular, steps three and four on page 54 (which focus on thinking about problems and drawbacks of picking a topic), was something I found useful in thinking about my field site.

After listing the subcultures and groups that I belonged too, I wasn’t sure about what I really wanted to explore or spend the last few weeks of the semester researching. But after getting to the third and fourth steps–questions focusing on practical issues of doing research (drawbacks, objections by people within the group, benefits to its members and yourself, and the possibility of giving back to a group)–I realized that the topic I wanted to write about and would be the most useful for these last few weeks of the semester was something I didn’t think of listing at all: job-seeking seniors (who are about to graduate). Continue reading →

Regarding my first post–reflecting on writing in the flash genre and my first submission to a writing contest–Brevity just announced the winners of its flash nonfiction essay contest inspired by Philip Graham. Although, I didn’t win anything, I can now post my short submission in full:

Headphones, Sound Effects

“No,” I said, secretly shocked by my own answer. I should be ecstatically answering the opposite, which is exactly what any of my buddies would do, and moments before I thought I would too.

When I started writing my critical essay analyzing Elizabeth Barrett Browning’sforty-third poem in Sonnets from the Portuguese, it was largely an effort to try to use one work to fulfill two different assignments for two different classes. But in the end I still ended up writing two slightly different essays that explored the same poem. Although they ended up being slightly different, both essays seemed to have a common desire: to write academic papers that didn’t sound academic (at least not in the usual sense of being overly distant in tone or staking its analysis on obscure or tangential facts). Continue reading →

In considering what makes a good blog posts (and good writing in general), I chose the Huffington Post article “Coming Up England by a Different Line” by Gary Lightbody, the lead singer of Snow Patrol. And the excerpt I’m sharing contains the article’s first few sentences:

Coming up England by a different line. Not my words, but those of Philip Larkin, British poet and miserable genius. God rest his soul. He loved a train. As do I. I studied Larkin at school and every time I am on a train I think of that line from his poem “I Remember I Remember.” I can’t help it.

At first I was unsure about writing a memory-based narrative for Brevity‘s flash nonfiction contest. I was most worried about choosing an interesting topic to write about without getting overly personal. Before it was even discussed in class, I already knew I didn’t want to write about anything traumatic or too heavy. But when I sat down at my computer, everything that popped into my head were things too personal that I didn’t want to put to paper — much less condense into 500 words (or less). Finding my topic was probably the hardest and longest part of writing the memory narrative.Continue reading →